Thursday, September 15, 2011

#3: Wordless Stories - Fantasia review, part 2

The Rite of Spring, Stravinksy
In this piece we see the
creation of the world from the "big bang" all the way up until the end
of the dinosaur era. The narrator prefaces this piece by stating that
"science, not art, inspired this piece." There are several missing
pieces in this sequence however, such as how we get from a swirling mass
of lava and ash to tiny living creatures floating in the water (there's a
smoky-hazy transition which is kind of lame, in my opinion). And even
more so, how do we go from fish crawling out of the water to a diversity of
gigantic dinosaurs? Needless to say, I'm unconvinced that Fantasia's
version of the history of the world is really that scientific.

It was also
quite odd for the whole first half of the film to end with dinosaurs
dehydrating in the hot sun. (The narrator says, "Well, we're not quite
sure what really happened to the dinosaurs. But we do know they all
died." Why, thank you for letting us know, Mr. Narrator. I was worried
they were still lurking around somewhere on an island or something. Oh wait, that's Jurassic Park.)

I had to resist the urge to break out into "If We Hold On Together" from Land Before Time during that whole scene. Didn't want to wake Jen up.

2 comments:

Disney used the Rite of Spring without Stravinsky's permission, and he HATED that it was used in this way. Add in the fact that the piece was chopped up and rearranged temporally to suit the film, and we have yet another example of Disney doing whatever they want.

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I need to confess that the term "Disnerd" is not my own -- it was coined by the actor Zachary Levi, who voiced the character Flynn Rider in 2010's Tangled and is a self-proclaimed Disnerd. Suffice it to say, I have a bit of a celebrity crush.